Pro Tip: Custom colors for weightpainting

I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while, and I kept forgetting, until the next time I had to do weight painting, and so this time I just decided to write the post, it’s a bit longer than usual, but it has big rewards.

The problem: ever painted weights?… well if you have, you probably noticed that the visual representation in the view-port is very inaccurate, why?, because when you’re weight painting very often you need to make sure that some vertices have either full influence or no influence at all from a joint, as you can see in this example one could think that at least half of the ear is 100% weighted to the corresponding joint…

Wrong!, as a matter of fact, that joint has  has 100% influence in 3 or fore vertices only, so again, inaccurate.

This makes weight painting much more tedious than it already should be. And you don’t want to have to go to the N panel and make sure each vertex is well weighted vertex by vertex.

The solution: Luckily, in the User preferences panel in blender, under system, you can define a custom weight paint gradient.

The idea here, is that we’ll use 4 colors, the 3 classics, blue, green and red, but more importantly, we’ll add two more, I wanted to use black and white since black represents 0 and white 1, but Blender’s deselected vertices are black so then it makes it hard to determine where are they, and so I went for an other convention that blender has which is pink for not found images, then so here we go.

We’ll do the gradient like this:

Great, so now, let’s see the same monkey weight paint with both methods.

As you can see, there is a noticeable difference, and now you can be sure when you’re painting your weights that your vertices are getting the weight you want, make sure that when you do the 0.9999 and 0.0001 positions you add that 4th digit, that gets you much closer to being ultra accurate with 1 and 0 representations, which are of course the important ones.

There you go, now go paint weights like a boss!

Happy Blending!